AI Social Media App ‘Hotshot’ Makes Fake Photos of You With Friends
A new social media app called Hotshot uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate fake photos of users and their friends — in any scenario that they want.
Last week, one of the app’s co-founders Aakash Sastry announced the launch of Hotshot, declaring: “Imagine if Midjourney knew what your friends looked like… Make photos with anyone in your contacts doing anything.”
1/ Imagine if Midjourney knew what your friends looked like…
Introducing Hotshot!
Make photos with ANYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS doing ANYTHING
Here’s pics of me and my co-founder John eating a salad + a video of me making them on Hotshot
🙏🏽 Download, it’s free:… pic.twitter.com/rlrRgkPY2B
— Aakash (@aakashsastry) May 3, 2023
Hotshot, which is available as a free-to-use app on iOS, allows users to select any friends from their contacts and then use the power of AI to create a photo of them in any situation or style that they imagine.
“Simply scan your face to sign up, and within minutes Hotshot learns how you look and can make photos of you in any situation or style you dream up!” the app’s description reads.
“When you add friends on Hotshot, you can make photos of each of them as well!”
In a demonstration video, Sastry showed how he generated photos of himself and his co-founder John “eating a salad at a fancy restaurant.”
4/ one more thing… because memeing our friends is fun, you can also use Hotshot easily in iMessage lol 🤩 pic.twitter.com/xf2bP4QYvu
— Aakash (@aakashsastry) May 3, 2023
In a further demonstration clip shared by Sastry, he shows how users are also able to create and share Hotspot-generated images of their friends directly in iMessage.
According to the description in the app store, Hotshot users can also select their school when signing up so they can make photos with their friends there.
Our latest Hotshot model we released last week generates really fun stuff
Spent so much time training, only really got to playing with it in app after we released it!
try! it's free: https://t.co/pOy9kpkcb3 pic.twitter.com/zTe6vJmE7l
— Aakash (@aakashsastry) May 8, 2023
Sastry’s announcement went viral and amassed over 154,000 views on Twitter. While many social media users were excited to use Hotshot, some questioned the privacy concerns and ethics of an app that uses AI to generate photos of friends in certain scenarios without their consent.
“My current friends would kill me if I tried this. Rightly so,” one individual comments.
Another user sardonically writes: “This will definitely not be used for bullying or harassment.”
In response to these concerns, Sastry says: “As with all social networks, content moderation is key here. The tech is very fun, and we take our role in making sure the joy that it brings outweighs the bad very seriously.”
Image credits: Header photo via Twitter/@aakashsastry
